


The After-life

by Zafaria



Category: Wizard101 (Video Game)
Genre: Gen, Wizard101 - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-01
Updated: 2020-08-01
Packaged: 2021-03-06 02:01:25
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,605
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25645477
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Zafaria/pseuds/Zafaria
Summary: The shapes that you drew may change beneath a different light, everything you thought you knew will fall apart but you'll be alright.
Comments: 2
Kudos: 7





	The After-life

There was an oak coat hanger by the door, with a tall knobby top and three spokes sticking out at right angles from each other. The one side without the spoke went up against the wall. The piece stood as tall as its owner, and it was perfect. It was regal, deep wood with swirling grain, art nouveau flourish and curves, and, it so happened, that in the days of its use, three spokes was exactly the number needed for everyone to have a spot for their things.

The spoke closest to the hallway was hung with a golden key on a ring, the only one on the lonesome hoop. Sometimes he’d leave his shoes under it, lined up toe to toe as he stood in his kitchen with the narrow countertops and boiled a kettle on a burner covered in piping. The spoke next to it would have, in the past, held another key ring and a black staff as short as a cane would be propped up against the legs of the coathanger. And the one closest to the door would have a cloak on it. She hung her cloak there and took her shoes off as soon as she could upon entering because she never wanted to drag the dirt from gardening throughout the house. 

They’d visit, they’d say for an hour, but it dragged into two and three and sometimes four. Sylvia would ask about the shriveling little garden in the back, and whether the tea was ever picked from the garden, but it never was. He bought it from the Bazaar. It was always imported, from some unimportant and unheard of place; the Aeriel Jungle or Cloudburst Forest. They didn’t know where these places were, and settled for imagining little farm beds of tea leaves growing in a space between the trees where the sunlight broke through the roof of the forest. That was good enough. They’d imagine some orange flowers and bright rocks and critters when they tasted the spice in the tea.

His brother always listened attentively in these conversations, but it was clear he didn’t know much about gardening, or growing one’s own tea plants, or even different tea varieties. He didn’t really take to testing different flavors and always did the same thing with the tea Cyrus made for him: two sugar cubes, a spoonful of honey, and a quarter-cup of milk, whether the tea was minty, spicy, lavender, or already dizzyingly sweet.

He would keep the low table in front of the sofa clear for all the fixings to be laid out back then. Now, it was covered over in books and newspaper clippings. He hadn’t had the time to keep up with his collections and sift through them all. They just languished and waited for him, year after year, covering over the coffee table. There wasn’t any need for it anyways, there were never any guests, no shared tea, no need for fixings. Sometimes Cyrus’s orthrus Harry would get onto the table, but quickly found it to be unnavigable with the stacks of books and hopped off after leaving a little pile of drool on a page. He’d turn one of his posy-red heads to Cyrus and bark a shrill cry like he was proud of what he had done. Cyrus would pat him on both heads and continue working at his desk.

Sometimes he wondered if he should ever have tried to start tea up with some others, if there were other professors or former students he could try catching up with but, no, that was  _ their _ thing together. He longed for the days where he had little incentive to clean up his squat little two-story house, shoved in between others and narrowed down. He wondered if other students looked at him and knew this was the kind of house he might have kept, or if they even wondered at all. Sometimes the professors would invite the more accomplished students for tea, to show them gardens or loan them rare books and then gush about those very texts. Cyrus never invited students for holiday feasts like Balestrom, never hung around his office after classes as long as Falmea, never tried to recommend his more gifted students books from his own personal collection. He packed up at the end of every day of classes and left. And he wondered if that ever seemed to bother any of the students, or if they were so naive they never did pick up why he hadn’t. 

A few of the older myth and storm students and one of the theurgists were riding around Golem Court one day in a giant pumpkin they had carved out and enchanted as a carriage for them all; it ended up looking a bit like an overburdened wagon with oversized toddlers clinging to it. They raced up and down the street for fun, laughing, wild, boisterous and loud, too many of them clinging to the giant gourd, catching angry glares from the adults sweeping up at their porches. They giggled and giggled and nearly flopped over when they caught the toes of their feet on the sidewalk, and they paced back and forth up and down the street with skinned knees and rosy cheeks and wide, toothy grins. 

And then they saw him.

They saw him hobble over to the post-box, the flag partially raised, as is it had been full, really full, for a long while but no one checked on it and it got tired of raising the little red widget. And then they saw him take a stack, almost as big as the ones for all the exams he’d bring into them everyday, from that little mailbox with the rust clinging on the edges, and they wondered for a moment if professors just got a lot of mail or if they were just too busy to check for it often or something else of the sort. And while they wondered about the nature of professors and mail, Cyrus in his lemon yellow robes and a pair of plan brown sandals hobbled back to the door and closed it. And the light in the front windows went out.

The house sat in stark greyness; the bricks, the shingles, the window panes with the drawn and heavy curtains, all grey, all muted, all unassuming. 

Those students, in the way that students usually do, knew that there was something deeply wrong happening. But it was an implacable, intangible wrong. They would watch Cyrus carefully in the classroom and as he came and went and how he walked and how tall he stood and whether he handed exams back with more force or fearsomeness or fatigue than the last time. Every little thing, they would pick it apart for clues. They looked even to the other students, even to the ones who slunk silently in their seats in the back, hoping, probing, maybe they knew something. It filled their lunchtime chatter in the commons, the kind of chatter that was ever-present, scheduled even, but had to die down and turned into hushes and whispers whenever others walked by. For the sake of preserving whatever dignity or grief their professor was struggling with.

And Cyrus knew but also didn’t quite know this was what was happening. He hadn’t seen the students that day on the street, but he saw them watching more peerlessly, eyes wider, fewer people nodding off and more contemplative faces. He knew that these weren’t about the lessons though, no one's grades were changing, and there was a difference in their eyes and their posture and even the way they fidgeted when they listened to what he was saying and when they listened to everything else about the room in those moments. 

Of course, he also saw one of his students, prosperous, quiet, and just as grief-stricken as him, sitting in the back. Sometimes she slept, or, at least, pretended to. She used to doze off, the way someone does when they get lost in a daydream and then tired by way of imagining. She instead never seemed like she wanted to be looked at. She kept her head down because she was tired. Tired of being. And Cyrus knew why, and also, didn’t really know why.

The classroom, despite his lecturing, was always so still in those moments when he saw his students,  _ her _ , slinking into their seats, like breath that was being held in, like the wind rushing in through the windows and taking all the sound out through the two double doors. Sometimes he thought he saw them wobble or heard them creak. He thought he’d see her in the back of the classroom lift her head a little, or maybe the wind rustle her hair. He looked at the windows to see if he had left the open, but they never were. He wondered if this was the same feeling the students had when they had to hush their conversations about him in the Commons as the other professors and respectable adults walked by. If this was the same feeling that the younger wizard had when she clambored out of bed every day or tried to sleep finally at night, amidst haunts and fright.

That stillness followed him back to the house, although a bit quieter, more relieved, the wind gone for the night and nothing but stale dust in the air. People had said that pets sometimes knew grief, and even loud little Harry would rush up to him, but stop short and stare in a wincing, disappointed way at Cyrus’s shoes. Harry turned corner and returned back to the living room and his favorite coffee table and wormed his way under it, while Cyrus moved phantom-like through to the kitchen to start dinner for the night.

One night he did his routine, came into the house with his head in a mire and hanging low, watched as Harry hopped off to the table again, and floated back through the long, narrow hallway with the tattered green runner and creaking floorboards. He found himself in his kitchen. He always did. And many times before he would wash his hands in the sink before starting dinner, let the water run a little longer as he thought. He’d bend down, pull open the cupboard under the sink, check to see his tea kettle was still there as the water above it continued running. Then he’d close the door again. Maybe tea wouldn’t ever be ready again.

The next day was a holiday, as Professor Balstrom had some telegraphing business to attend to and Professor Falmea needed time to work on an exchange program. Ravenwood was moving on, growing, weblike, and Cyrus was still there, teaching in his usual way and hoping that the students never noticed, or at least never cared, that he kept assigning them work that was more and more droning and brainless than the last time; that his lessons from before with rigor and sly questionings of “Are you sure?” and “Is that right?” weren’t missed, or even noticed as missing.

The students, they do notice these things. They were thankful for the easier work, but worried about the Myth Professor,  _ their _ Myth Professor. After their calculated observations over the course of a few days, and rigorous planning during those hushed lunches, they finally had time during the holiday to begin their work. One of the older students, the same one that slumped in the back of the classroom, had a nice, if old, barnhouse with a square iron stove that had a large, flat top the size of a bed, and smoothed out and light pine cabinets ringing all the way around the main room. She saw her chance to do, well,  _ something _ ,  _ anything _ . She invited everyone from her class over. She had been gone a while, out on some errands or something important, but they never got to talk to her about these things, just observe her pale, drooping face afterwards. She moved so swiftly through worlds, there was never a stable postbox to reach her at. So she relished in the ability to finally be among friends, not people who grabbed her wrists to drag her to dark crevices, or reach for her guts to pull out, but people who used their hands to knead dough and pick vegetables from the garden and hold perfect apples up to the sun, who used their hands to hold and hug and hope. And they would make fine guests, a light of their own, surrounding the large woodblock island in her kitchen, doing all those things: kneading and sorting vegetables, and holding, and hoping. Like a beacon, like a great altar, the kitchen was where one of the oldest rituals could be done: cooking.

And it was a ritual, of sorts. It was an unspoken community, the people who cared enough for the professor to rise early and come to a foreign house that stood all big and vacant and dusty, and make themselves at home in that open, echoey place. Their chatter filled the wide and lofty spaces of the old house, their voices almost as yellow and light as the sun coming through the windowpanes. They had wicker baskets of eggs white and brown and splotchy and smooth, bags of flour and sugar sitting at the ends of the counter in buckets, and little brown-bottles of vanilla extract. Somewhere around there on that island, by the sink, there was also a jar of Marleymite, and some of the other foods more subjective to taste. They emitted a warmth hotter than the oven.

So they wiped down their hands, the more than a dozen standing around the kitchen, forming a line at the sink like they would have to when younger, taking turns passing the soap holder back to take a dollop of it, then give it to the next person as they stepped forward to the running water. And the first person went to the flour with a big glass mixing bowl. They grabbed the little iron shovel scoop from one of the drawers and started filling in the bowl with the flour, like someone frantic but determined filling a sandbag before a sea storm. And then a hand reached from the side and pushed the eggs in front of the person scooping flour, and they looked up to the girl who had passed the eggs, and they both smiled at each other and laughed. The whole scene was a little thing, absurd and momentous. Strategic and chaotic and clustered and free and loud but unified in the silent language of dedication, of work. Strange. It was all very strange indeed. The older student’s time at the school hadn’t been anything but strange either. It was fitting in a hodge-podge, freakish way.

Within an hour, they pulled out wooden trays from the oven that had full loaves of bread with some seeds speckled on them. And they were perfect; they were kind of round, a little lopsided and flat on the left, with a darkened crust and a little char on the bottom and some flour and sesame seeds balanced on top. And they were just perfect. Someone else popped a pan into the oven as soon as the bread left, and someone else tossed lettuce and peppers and tomatoes in a big dish then hurriedly poured a bottle of vinegar and olive oil on the whole thing. Behind them, someone snagged one of the full, yet unused peppers as he reached around the salad chef, and bit into it with a satisfied crunch. They talked about the garden and the girl who owned the house drew them over to the window to see it, plucked of anything devourable but still tangled with green vines and wide, unfazed leaves. 

When they were done, they loaded everything into baskets and draped old blankets on their shoulders. They set out into Wizard City once more, crawling their way through the late summer heat through the Shopping District and towards Golem Court. They moved at an admirable pace for a handful of students with skinny arms overburdened by ten pounds of food each with their pets bobbling along beside them and sometimes between their feet.

They knew exactly which house they were going to.

And they got there and stood, in something part cluster and something part line, trying to fit on the stoop of the doorstep, and then giving up and spilling onto the walkway. And they sat there for a moment, looking all around at each other, sucking in a deep breath. The wizard, the girl in a purple robe and white stockings, the one who owned the house and the sorrow all the same, knocked at the door. It was silent and silent and silent, no scurrying or creaking of anyone moving across the floorboards inside. They wondered if they had maybe just missed Cyrus, right until the moment the door popped open a wedge and his face looked out onto them.

“Hi, Professor Drake. I know...things have been tough. We thought we, well, you see...we know, and we’re, we’re very sorry for, for what happened, and because it’s holiday, we had some time to get some stuff together for you to show our thanks…”

The students behind her cradled the baskets nervously and pulled at the old blankets on their shoulders. Even though she held her head up, interested, stiff, while the other students bobbled theirs and scuffed their boots, she couldn’t have been more afraid. She was the most scared of all of them.

Cyrus peered back. He wasn’t upset they bothered him on his off day; he wasn’t even really worried how they knew which door to knock at. He wasn’t even upset at his student before him, who may or may not have been why his brother died. He never wanted to think too deeply on it anyways. His brother just died. He just did. And that was it, and sometimes not knowing why was all the better. Sometimes it was best to pretend like he really didn’t remember any Malistaire other than his thoughtful, peaceful, literature-loving brother; and he tried to find a place in his mind where that brother could stay awake forever. And he wished he could carve out a little space for his younger, sleepier prodigy too, before she became like Malistaire, something empty and craven and driven to ends for things she didn’t want to be.

He looked at their feet and all the little pets running about them; an egg, a hydra, a cerberus scratching behind one of his ears, a fat happy piggle resting on the ground. Harry peeked out from around the corner and let out a yip when he saw the other critters.

Cyrus was only curious  _ how much food they had made, and had they really done it all just that morning? _ It was only one o’clock. The thought of his students waking up so early, even his tired and grief-stricken one, just to orchestrate all of that was almost enough to make him cry. He swallowed hard and looked back to them.

And then, he did cry. He started in, a shaky, weak, and quiet “...thank you,” that fell apart at the end as his eyes watered. And some of the students looked away or down, and the girl at the front, now with wet eyes too, curled her lip a little and gave a tiny nod. Cyrus wiped at his eyes with his sleeve. 

“So, are you leaving this all here, for me?” he said, looking between all the baskets. “It seems like a lot and I can’t keep it all.”

The students looked between each other. As if deciding who would say what. Two people started to speak at the same time, both voices predicting each other.

“We--”

“We…” they glanced at each other and one held his mouth open a moment. The other smiled back and finished the thought for them. “We wanted to see if maybe we could sit with you? Well, for one, everything we made actually looks really good. Second is that, you know, we just  _ can’t _ go a single day in our lives without spending time listening to Professor Drake,” he said, drawing out the  _ can’t _ in a joking way. He knew the entire idea was odd, a long shot, but he tried to lighten up the place, make the air less suffocating, less hushed and held in.

“Oh…”

“No, uh, to be honest, we noticed you seem...grumpier than usual and worried about you. We...want to know how you’re doing, if that’s okay?”

“Well.”

They waited and shuffled their feet a moment. Cyrus thought back about his house, his coffee table, how unprepared his house was for guests.

“You made everything yourselves?” he asked.

“Yes!” they said in proud unison.

“You grew everything?”

“Yeah, I have a nice farm going, lots of different things this year...” the one in the front said, falling off, thinking of those vibrant, lively, hopeful things.

Maybe the only good place to eat was in the garden. They were clearly prepared for a picnic, since they had blankets. But he thought of his garden, and the state of disrepair that that too had fallen into, and let out a lengthy, deep breath that was not quite loud enough to be a sigh.

They sensed the tension, and they could see just from the little wedge of the door that was open, that there were stacks of things and the lights were off and the floors dusty. 

“It’s okay, you should see our dorms,” someone said.

They all smiled a little, sheepish smile.

“Oh, well you went through all this work. Alright. But please stay just on the bottom floor,” he instructed. They all nodded and let out some quiet “okay”s.

They trodded through the house with their baskets, following in a line, like ducklings being led around, and they tiptoed behind Cyrus’s sure steps like they were treading on sacred and holy ground. The one student from the front picked up some of the pets. She held her breath. She tried not to stare at the back of Cyrus’s head and imagine what sweltering pain he must’ve felt in his brain, the rubber-bands strung around his heart, the crushing weight on his lungs. She wondered if he was ever as tired as she was.  _ No, more so. That was his brother, not mine _ .

And she made it through the longest journey she had ever taken, through the darkest tunnel she knew, in that house where she felt so unwelcomed not because of Cyrus, but because of transgression.  _ Maybe being here is a transgression all it’s own _ , she thought.

They set up a patchwork of blankets in the back that covered nearly the entire yard, and the little overgrown garden under the window sat up against the house, at the head of it. And some of the students sat precipitously near it, including the girl in the purple robes, and they sat in such a way that their hands fell over the edges of the blankets and brushed the overgrown grass and laid at their sides there. They began divvying out food, everyone pulling a large, round roll of bread with flour on their hands. 

Cyrus couldn’t help but notice occasionally between timid bites of the role that the two students nearest the garden would turn and look over their shoulders. Their arms would rustle behind them for a moment, out of sight, then they’d brush their hands off and take another bite when they noticed he was watching them. When the one finally shifted and leaned forward to grab the big salad-bowl as it was being passed towards them, he finally saw what they were up to. A little pile of weeds sat behind them, out of view.

He pointed to the garden and shook his head a little as he leaned it to the side. “You don’t have to do that.”

They looked at him with blank eyes. They’d been caught, but they weren’t exactly trying to hide what they were up to. They didn’t even mean it with intent; they saw weeds, they pulled. She’d gotten use to that, seeing problems, and then just fixing, wordlessly.

“I know it’s a mess,” he continued, “but it’s not your job; you’re guests, it’s everyone’s day off.”

They continued with their blank looks. They didn’t even look like they were breathing, they were so still.

“Sorry.”

“It’s...it’s fine. It’s fine.” He didn’t know why it had bothered him so much. Yes, they were his guests, but something more made him hesitant to see them move anything from the garden. They weren’t Sylvia. That was it. Only two pairs of hands ever worked on that garden, and maybe he wanted to keep it like that.

But how foolish he thought that was, at the same time. Why keep an overgrown garden in honor of someone? Didn’t that show that he actually  _ didn’t _ care about the memories there, since their time together had been tending to the garden, helping things grow. Helping.

And now it was an overgrown tangle with thistles and prickly things and unpleasant things vying for space, climbing over one another. Little smothering death after little smothering death. Nothing new in years, no color other than a widespread sagey green, no butterflies or rabbits or small, complex communities snuggled between the leaves.

Helping.  _ That was all this was _ , he thought,  _ the students helping _ . He was sure one of the students he recognized as a life wizard would have been old enough to have Sylvia for a few years. He wondered if she existed the same way in her memory too.

“Sorry,” he said back. “Sylvia used to help me with it.” As if that somehow would make it crystal clear to them all. He let the words sit for a minute, then thought maybe he had misspoke. It was when he opened his mouth again to try and add something, what exactly he did not know, when the theurgist offered her thoughts.

“That’s nice. She tended to all the gardens in the school yard too. Did she ever spend her free time doing anything other than caring for plants? She spent all her time at work caring for students, and then all her time outside of it caring for plants. And sometimes students too.”

He paused. He swallowed hard. He cried again. Someone remembered his sister-in-law just like he had. In that little moment, in those few words, she was alive again; a perfect image of her, just as she had been, kneeling by a stone planter-bed, patting soil, holding a little brown rabbit or waving at a student across the courtyard with her glasses slipping down her short, turned nose.

He regained himself. She did. She did do some things outside of gardening. She had tea. He would never forget that they all had tea together. And so he told them that, and they all nodded little polite nods, and waited a moment.

“I had Professor Drake, uhm, your brother for many years. But I never did find out, I guess, before everything; someone said he wrote poetry. Is that true?” the boy asked.

“Yes. Yes!” He said emphatically. The words were full, they were a cry, but of the ancient sort, summoning something back to life, to wholeness. Cyrus started laughing. “Yes he did, and he wasn’t too bad at it!” And in that moment too, Malistaire, his perceptive and empathetic brother was alive as well. And they spent the afternoon asking questions about Sylvia and Malistaire, and how they met, which the theurgist knew well, for Sylvia was always gushing over her husband, and the necromancers knew little of, since Malistaire had always gotten so wayward and sidetracked with all his stories about their adventures whenever anyone asked how they met. And they asked about Cyrus too.

He answered. He gardened, obviously, though not of late. And he painted sometimes too, but he had also put the brush down for a while. The students gave mystified gasps of “ _ really _ ?” as if they never imagined their teacher having fun, and certainly not in his current state. 

“Really,” he said. He stood and waved them up. “Come on, I can show you all. And I can show you some of my brother’s poems too.”

So they went back into that house, that now felt bigger; the stacks of papers everywhere weren’t junk, but archives, some less important and some jewels. They could tell which were which. Old student papers were probably among the less important items, but in the drawers or the very bottom layers of things, or the few pieces left neatly uncovered on his desk, all the photos and letters and poems and old packets from the seeds planted in the garden years ago. Those were the precious jewels of Cyrus’s entire life. He would hold a photo of them together carefully in his hand, and the students would gather around and look, in fascination, at a time when their professors were all only a decade older than themselves. And the girl in the purple didn’t quite make it into the semi-circle and peered cautiously over one of her friend’s heads; then moved to the bathroom without anyone noticing.

In there, she wiped her eyes and ran the water cold to keep the redness of her cheeks down. The photo, Cyrus’s stories, all let her know she had destroyed nothing. That he was sincere, his brother, his real brother, had been dead for a long time by the time she ran into Malistaire. And if she had or hadn’t destroyed him, she hadn’t really destroyed anything at all. Which perhaps was worse. To travel all that way and through all those places for all those people, to end a man who was so miserable and so lonely and small and weak at his end, that it was all just unnecessary. 

She thought of Cyrus then, at that moment, at the end of his brother’s life. She thought of how he stood tall, proud, maybe of her, maybe that his brother could finally rest, but sad and weeping. Full of anguish and resolution that bit at each other’s edges, that refused to coexist. She looked at the bathroom counter around her. It was cluttered with dirty handtowels, soaps out of their dishes, a crinkled toothpaste tube, and soap slime from all the places the bars had been left out.

The bathroom was small. She grabbed one of the few clean hand towels and wet a corner of it, then started to scrape the soap residue away. And she didn’t know exactly where everything laid out on the counter went, but tried by putting the toothbrush and the toothpaste upright in a cup, and neatly set the bottle of eyedrops in the corner and then added cotton swabs upright to the cup with the toothbrush and toothpaste. She stacked the dirty towels from the counter on the floor together. She thought of Cyrus being the only person there for Malistaire when he died, gently placing him into the open bed of a tomb, as she pried the soap up from the counter and laid it to rest in the soap dish. She rinsed her hands one last time of it, then walked out to rejoin her friends.

Cyrus was just finishing showing them the photo and telling stories around it. He placed it on top of one of the stacks, although haphazardly as he began to turn towards something else. The stack teetered. The life student was there, and while Cyrus was turned and walking away, she moved the photo from the top, lifted all of the papers in her hands at once, gave them a quick tap on the table, and pressed them into line with her palms flat, the edges pressing back into her brown palms as she straightened them up. She placed the photo back on top, delicately, keeping her fingers from touching the surface. The photo was centered on the papers. Then she went through the rest of the papers on the coffee table, making little piles in rapid speed, so there were only three stacks of things next to each other and the rest of the coffee table was visible. The students straggled behind Cyrus, picking up their pets and keeping them from the rest of the house, not knowing what precious things might be housed in them.

He led them over to a wall where a landscape hung. He admired it for a second, then turned to them and let them know he had painted it, once, when he was almost their age.

“Whoa,” they said.

“Yes. It’s the Grand Chasm. Beautiful place. I haven’t been there since, but I do miss it.” He delved into a little history of the place, pointing at the pillars and bricks of the buildings in the landscape as he talked, and the world was rebuilt for him as he told the story. They all nodded enthusiastically, and even the girl in the purple nodded, although a little more wistfully, lost.

When it early evening and the sun was not setting but was slinking lower in the sky, the students filed out of the house, pets in hand again, and he stood by the door and waved them off with Harry drooling and wagging his tail, sitting at his feet with interest as the figures of the students got smaller and smaller. The girl in the purple at the back turned with her round piggle cradled in her arm, and waved with a single motion, her arm skyward, her palm open and flat, honest, her face solemn.

And he waved back at her, wrist loose, hand held at his chest, face solemn. When they were gone, he closed the door, and took that hand to his chest. The pain was back, like it hadn’t been in months. He couldn’t fathom how joy could be followed so closely in step by grief.

And he thought of these things for a little while, as he cleaned up the house and tried to shove all the many dishes of leftovers into his fridge, and left some scraps on a plate on the floor for Harry and scratched Harry behind his ears. And he continued to think of these things, until he passed by his coffee table again, and saw the photo of him and his brother and his sister-in-law. Then, he realized that the coffee table was visible again. And the photo was at the top of the pile, proudly displayed.

_ Those students _ , he thought.

And he went to the bathroom to take a shower before bed, and after he did so and dressed he stood over the mirror a minute. Cyrus noticed the counter was clean too. The soap was tucked into the soap dish. And all he could think, again, was  _ those students _ . He went to sit at his desk and organize some more papers. Maybe he would try to find his lecture plan a few days early. He opened a drawer and found an old packet of seeds, the top of it ripped open, the torn edge rolled down over the rest of the packet to keep the seeds in. The label was faded, but he could see from the image that they were seeds for tomatoes, red, round, and resilient. He unfurled the pack and peeked inside. They looked like they might still grow. And then he shuffled in his drawer more and found a pressed packet of bean seeds, sunflower seeds, seeds for oxeye daisies and old pressings of some from a previous garden he had grown. He thought of planting them in the past, taking his finger and poking gently at the dirt to make a little space for them, and how Sylvia just crouched down, took her index finger, and jabbed it into the dirt confidently, like she knew exactly where each seed needed to be without measuring the soil depth or spacing. And she did. He thought about the little pile of weeds the students had snuck out of the garden.  _ It’s worth a shot _ , he thought, as he grabbed a sticky note and began to sketch a layout for some new plants. He had the day off tomorrow. He could finish pulling weeds, like those students had started.

Those students. They were meek, and they tried. Most of them didn’t know grief like he did yet. Maybe setting papers straight and plucking weeds and making lunch felt significant for them to do. He thought of his student, who had been there, who spoke at the front door at first, but not after, he realized. Who lived with grief, a different kind. Just as much as those students couldn’t get to him past his grief, he didn’t know how to get to her. And maybe none of the other students knew about that or how to get to her either.

It struck him. Sometimes she said in passing she’d be around during long weekends or holiday breaks and would finally try to catch up on her missing work. Lydia mentioned her having an older sister once during the downtime before a meeting, but she never spoke of her sister herself. And she was never seen outside of class, or lunch that day, or occasionally scurrying to the Headmaster’s tower, or running her hasty speechless errands to the Shopping District, efficient, unwavering, in matters of minutes. She was never with anyone, he thought. Not here and not in all those places Ambrose sent her to. She was alone. She was totally alone.

And he was also alone. He was alone, in his bed, his covers pulled up and his hands resting gently across the top, curled over the hem of the sheets. In that indominatrable darkness, he realized that although the other students did little things like pluck weeds and cook lunch, and they didn’t know how little it was in the scheme of things, surely she knew how absolutely finitismal those things were. And yet, she did them anyways. She made room from her overburdening grief, pushed the crushing guilt back long enough, carved out a little moment in time, to flour the breadboard and coordinate her kitchen, and tend to her garden, and right the soap and pinch the weeds out of the garden. After seeing the worlds, and death, and fire; and an eternal sadness for the place he called home after she saw what it was in the Grand Chasm, after she met the ghosts of students who looked just like her, who died to things bigger than themselves that they never wanted to be a part of.

That last bit got him choked up again. He and his brother had never been very interested in the war. Sylvia had been a good tactician, but also certainly wasn’t interested. That’s why they moved to Ravenwood. And they all were accepted as professors, and had many great students, and gardens and photos, and paintings, and tea; and despite sickness and madness, which now maybe he was falling prone to, they survived the war and the initial heartbreak and had had their happy ending, if only for a few decades that seemed all too quick and distant now.

He was starting to lull sleep after fighting back tears all day. 

He hoped that girl in the purple robes got that too.

**Author's Note:**

> So we end. My single longest piece I've to share. I was wistfully sad I couldn't just offer "Leaving Home" again, or a different but similar unpublished story in the same vein, but I think this is perhaps an even better place to stop: right in the middle, right in the heart of things.
> 
> It has been three very long years. Thank you for being here for them.


End file.
